Ahh Monkey Island, active from 1990 to 2000 showed off some of the best that the ill fated adventure game genre had to offer. The Monkey Island series grew with the ages graphically, but poor sales eventually caused Lucasfilm to abandon the fifth and final Monkey Island game, along with sequels to Sam and Max and Full Throttle — at least for now.

Monkey Island had you take control of Guybrush Threepwood, self proclaimed ‘mighty pirate’, when in actuality he began as a teenager pirate wannabe despite the ridicule of his pirate idols. You get the standard treatment throughout the games, you find items, use items with other items and talk to the various people that you meet on the islands. One of the reasons that this basic gameplay was so popular was the great writing and humor that went into the series, timeless features such as insult sword-fighting, where you have to use the correct insult with the received taunt to knock your foe back and eventually win the fight, despite this ‘combat’ there’s no risk of failure in the series, the only end screen you may see is when you’ve shut off the game through frustration of trying to pair two seemingly random items together to solve a puzzle. The humor of the series is difficult to describe to someone who has not seen it, although the sword fights are a fine example the general obscurity of the acts you perform keep you wanting to see what will happen next, much like a lot of the great Luscas(arts/film) games, it’s a whole lot like reading a great book or watching a funny movie than most games you’ll experience now.

Sadly Lucas seems to have a hard time with making these classics freeware, this is especially unfortunate since the great software ScummVM emulates these great games flawlessly on more systems than I can name (Dreamcast anyone?), but as long as you have the original files. I urge you all to try to find copies of these great games and while you’re at it, why not give a glance to the other great adventure games of the 90’s Sam and Max, Full throttle and Simon the sorcerer are ancient, but still very much worth your time and cash.

Worth mentioning is the great Sam & Max series currently on GameTap, created by some of the talent that brought the Monkey Island series together, you’ll get one episode free and also free Psychonauts which is a great effort to bring the adventure game genre back into life.  Seriously it’s free, play them people!

Syndicate lived on many platforms between ‘93 and ‘97 and is perhaps still familiar to most of you, it surely won’t be the last Bullfrog game I’ll talk about in one of these little segments, so I hope you’re a fan of the Molyneux

There are three major games in the series, expansions and numerous versions made several changes, but really we are looking at; Syndicate, Syndicate Gen/SNES and Syndicate wars. The story for the first games is extremely simple, you are in charge of a Syndicate, there are regions of the world that are loyal to other Syndicates, you go to those regions and complete a mission, now that region is loyal to you. There’s no rocket science really involved there. Syndicate wars takes things much further, your syndicate is controlling the populous through mind control when “The Church of the New Epoch” starts ruining your fun and implants a virus in the control chips of many of your civilians, this causes those infected to go renegade and you’ll soon be fighting the church, police and these new renegade civilians who have somehow stumbled on a stockpile of guns and started to group together.

Syndicate

At its core, Syndicate is an isometric shooter set in a quasi 21xx blade runner future, with lots of police to shoot, civilians to shoot and cars to drive/shoot. But Syndicate has a whole lot of style behind itwith a great deal of tactics and variety to keep each mission fresh, you won’t be finding just simple run and gun missions, instead missions will often require you to slip through areas of the city to capture (persuade) a target and try to safely get them out of the city while opposing Syndicates take shots at you from the rooftops. Between missions you’ll be using money that you’ve either collecting by taxing countries out the ass or from blowing up banks, and spending it on some research. Once you’ve acquired a weapon from inside a mission you can take it back to your base and begin research, with the goal of eventually being able to purchase more identical weapons for yourself, or you could throw your credits towards research and upgrades for your cyborgs directly, giving them a better ability to handle the performance enhancing drugs you’ll be pumping into them, or increase accuracy, speed, health… etc. Play poorly and you’ll find your money goes quickly and you may soon be out of new recruits as your poorly equipped drug intoxicated solders stumble into battle you may find your best option is to run into a crowded area and self-destruct an agent or two just so you can loot some guns and continue the fight.

Syndicate GEN

Focusing on the more advanced Syndicate Wars, you’ll often find yourself spoilt for choice between nearly 30 different items that your guys can hide under their trench-coats. Starting with the industry standard pistol, razor wire (stretch it across the city and watch the enemy stumble through it) or get some knock out gas and throw it into a crowd. Later in the game the ballistics increase tenfold with satellite bombardment, nuclear hand-grenades and sentry guns. Syndicate Wars was especially noted for having fast 3d combat with the ability to destroy buildings with large glorious explosions and eventually level large areas of a city, now scattered with debris and corpses.

You can’t go wrong with the Syndicate games, the SNES & GEN versions added co-op but sadly Syndicate wars replaced it with a death-match, I’d love to see a sequel and some online co-op appear in the future, perhaps with Populous DS making an appearance we’ll see other Bullfrog franchises make a re-appearance, if so then Syndicate is the top of my list.

Syndicate Wars

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Check out this youtube introduction of Syndicate wars on the PC.

Back in 1994 when most where playing on Warcraft 1, Sonic 3 or watching Pulp Fiction, I was still holding onto my Amigas, much like Yuan Works and a Dreamcast. This introduced me to many obscure video games that never came close to mainstream, Liberation by Mindscape will always be one of those games.

Liberation is the sequel to the equally unknown 1990 game Captive, between them they broke a lot of new ground for both RPGs and gaming in general. Liberation stars off with an Intro that really stood out for its time with some high quality pre-rendered visuals, rather than the low quality FMV that had started appearing on a lot of these newfangled CD based systems. Once you are through the intro you’re dropped into this first person open world in control of 4 armed androids on a quest to free ‘captives’ who are being held by some crazy police droids. You can move your 4 droids separately or in a group around a massive city with way more rooms and doors than you could ever expect from a 14 year old Amiga game, you’ll get a feeling of open space like the Elder Scrolls series, but way ahead of its time. When you are not stumbling blindfolded around the city you can get down with the nitty-gritty of the droids

Nitty-gritty is exactly what you get. The words unique and revolutionary get thrown around a little more than they should, but Captive II pulls out several tricks that really surprise. A great example of this is that rather than simply buying new droid parts, you actually go onto the circuit board and replace chips and resisters, then re-configure parts for better power usage and to boost the various typical RPG traits.

Beyond this, the basic inventory system also has some original features allowing you to carry whatever you want as long as you could get it to fit inside your bag. Other RPGs such as Diablo adopted this system, however Captive II also featured object collision detection, forcing you to move items out of the way if you wanted to get to the center of your backpack. Going further still, you can actually disassemble one of droids and throw it into the backpack of another, then run around with it. This can get useful if you are watching your power levels or one of the droids gets knocked to pieces, a quick recharge is always just a plug socket away, but the electric bills must be astronomical, but it’s totally crazy!

Above you can see some customization of the main game display, this is done using a custom chip you attach to one of your droids, other chips such as a local map, or a mini copy of space invaders can also be purchased from one of the creepy residents of this futuristic wonderland. You can go to these stores to buy the usual things, ammo, guns or perhaps a new arm for your mindless avatars. Your local shopkeepers might end up looking a little too familiar as you move through the game as it becomes apparent that In the future cloning must of gone rampant, you’ll find the same dozen or so character models running around the city (Special bonus for having Dr Who’s K9) although they do all have varying demeanors towards you. Some of these guys are just more than happy help, others like the charming Daruma Doll look alike above would rather pickpocket some credits from your backpack, which happens all too often.

Captive could of been the start of something big, but the series ended on this note, perhaps Byte Engineers put too many eggs into the dying Amiga basket, but the game certainly wasn’t perfect. The CD32 speech was a very random mismatch of strange accents and bad acting, everything looked pretty much the same over and over again (Picture Mass Effect side missions X 100) and the whole game suffered from a large amount of disorientation since it was just too hard to find out what you should be doing. Still even with these faults, the series always dwells on the back of my mind, since it totally blew it open with what it tried to do, we simply don’t have enough good futuristic RPGs. Roll on Fallout III!

Winding back five years ago into an era of SARS and N-Gage. Factor 5, now known for developing Lair for the PS3, developed a little gem called Rogue Squadron 3 for the Nintendo Gamecube. If you wanted to team up with a bud and start shooting down the AT-AT on Hoth or go flying through the behemoth Deathstar, then jumping in a seat with the members of Rogue Squadron got you right there. Some may say that Rogue Squadron was replaced by Pandemic’s Battlefront series, which did feature some great space battles, but also focused on some of the weaker parts of Rogue Squadron, the ground combat. Running around with blasters is all well and good, I love the battlefield series and I’m sure I’d love Warhawk just as much should I get a chance to try it, but space combat delivers a contrast to the already overpopulated 3rd person arena. Personally I’d like to see Factor 5 turn back to LucasArts and work on bringing the series up to today’s generation.

Although you may never of gotten the chance to play the X-Wing series on the PC back in the early 90’s, you’ll have likely still heard of it’s tales sung in the fables of gaming lore. Between X-Wing and the Wing Commander series it was an era of the space life, and life was good. The series sadly didn’t make it through the decade but before it was done Totally Games released a rough diamond called X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, which had more than its share of problems. XvT brought some of the best multiplayer gaming ever experienced to the hungry 56k masses, 8 players could all team up together to complete one of the many space battles or duke it out in some team based dog fights. Playing together with a group of friends was a blast, but pale in comparison to what an updated Rogue Squadron of this generation could achieve. Now with the online matchmaking of systems like Xbox live perhaps large 32 player battles will be possible with miltiplayer online co-op much like todays FPS.

So there’s my wish, I want Totally Games’ and Factor 5’s love child with fully fleshed out original story and online co-op. Perhaps being able to select the individual members of Rogue Squadron like tubby old Porkins. Then throw on some team based combat, defend the ship, standard dogfight, race to the flag, it practically writes its self. Throw on some CoD4 style levels to get new ships and weapons and we have ourselves a game.